Category: Tech & Design News

“Can I be sued if my website isn’t accessible? YES. Over 5,000 website accessibility lawsuits were filed in the United States between January and June last year. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was created. At first, it only dealt with “barriers to entrance” meaning physical barriers, such as installing wheelchair ramps for stairs, doors, etc. In 2010, the Act was updated to included websites. The ADA determined that denying access to information constitutes a barrier to entrance.” Read the full article on Automation Alley.

“The technology industry has long been known, lampooned and lamented as a man’s world. With 0.4% of female pupils choosing to study computer science for A-Level last year, the tech world is at risk of morphing (or should that be crystallising) into a hotbed of white, male computer science graduates with an inexplicable proclivity for hoodies (see: Zuckerberg).

Armed with years of high-intensity coding classes and mechanics modules, these Imperial College graduates are sharp-elbowed, ambitious – and overwhelmingly male. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with the male gender (although there are corners of Twitter that would vehemently disagree), tech’s gender imbalance needs to change.

“2018 has been a bad year for most businesses that have chosen to fight website accessibility cases filed under Title III of the ADA. Plaintiffs filing in federal court secured their second judgment on the merits in a website accessibility lawsuit, bringing the federal court judgment score to 2-0 in their favor. Additionally, in twenty-one cases where defendants filed early motions to dismiss, judges have allowed eleven to move forward. While a forty percent dismissal rate doesn’t seem bad, most of the cases that were dismissed had a common set of…”

While the designs of brick-and-mortar stores increasingly accommodate people with mobility concerns, the online world still presents significant challenges for the 15 per cent of the world’s population living with disabilities. For example, hearing-impaired users may have trouble with…” Keep reading ↓

Ann Cavoukian, former 3-Term Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and currently Distinguished Expert-in-Residence, leading the Privacy by Design Centre of Excellence at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada:

“I call myself an anti-marketer, especially these days. My background has predominantly come from database marketing and the contextualization of data to make more informed decisions to effectively sell people more stuff. The data that I saw, whether it be in banking, loyalty programs, advertising and social platforms – user transactions, digital behavior, interactions, conversations, profiles – were sewn together to create narratives about individuals and groups, their propensities, their intents and their potential risk to the business….”